Beyond Bananas: Can You Guess The West Coast’s Third-Favorite Fruit?

It’s the biggest retailer in America, and the world, so the shopping trends at Wal-Mart can be taken as a fairly reliable indicator of what people are buying in general. And while reading this month’s edition of Wal-Mart World, a company newsletter, we noticed one lively little factoid that might surprise some people.

So this month’s Corporate Intelligence pop quiz is about the produce section. And more specifically, the best selling produce on the East and West Coasts.

Wal-Mart’s stores in the U.S. are divided into three regions:

Wal-Mart

The question: bananas and strawberries are the biggest sellers in the produce section. But in the Central and West regions, there’s a surprising number three. What is it?

Highlight the invisible text below for the answer…

Clementines.

Yep, the clementine, a variety of seedless mandarin, is number three in much of the country. As the WSJ reported in 2012, the market for clementines has been revolutionized by Cuties, a brand of clementine that has become a smash hit:

From a hillock in the San Joaquin Valley, Berne Evans III recently surveyed a citrus grove that stretches as far as the eye can see. “It’s the largest clementine planting in the world,” he said, smiling.

The groves make Mr. Evans the king of the Cuties, a brand of seedless, sweet and easy-to-peel mandarin that is storming the nation’s fruit aisles and changing eating habits that span generations. The navel orange, after reigning supreme for decades, has a challenger.

The rise of Cuties heralds the arrival of big-money marketing in a tradition-steeped corner of American industry. Techniques once reserved for promoting consumer products have now made their way into the produce section. Just as people have long asked for a “Kleenex” instead of a tissue, they are starting to ask for “Cuties” when they mean mandarins.

Dan Krauss for The Wall Street Journal

And thanks to some top-notch marketing, the Cutie has become a big earner for its growers:

Cuties fit the long-standing pattern of transformative marketing insights that have shaped the U.S. consumer-product landscape. The automatic washing machine changed the nature of the American household. The remote control upended TV advertising. The advent of pre-peeled baby carrots in a bag redefined cubicle snacking at office parks coast to coast.

t’s too early, of course, to elevate the seedless mandarin to a place in this pantheon. But in the meantime, the small, glossy, deep-orange fruit is, acre for acre, the most profitable citrus in America. Across California’s citrus belt, farmers are ripping out orange, lemon and grapefruit trees to switch to mandarins.

For what it’s worth: in the East, seedless grapes are the number three seller.

And if you’re taking a look at Wal-Mart World, be sure to read the story of Don Elliott, a 35-year veteran of one of the company’s Florida stores. “I knew Sam Walton well,” he says. “I can remember him telling me that, as a manager, I should put God first, family second, and Walmart third in my priorities.” Mr. Elliott and his wife have put that advice into action, he says: “Over the course of 19 years we helped raise 56 children.”